世論 What Japan Thinks

Welcome back to normal service from What Japan Thinks, and my apologies again for being offline for so long. We’ll start off the year with a survey connected with one of my most popular themes of 2008, a look with japan.internet.com at goo Research’s 42nd regular monthly survey on mobile upgrade needs, with a question on touch panels.

Demographics

Between the 16th and 19th of December 2008 exactly 1,000 mobile phone users from the goo Research online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.0% of the sample were female, 2.1% in their teens, 18.4% in their twenties, 36.6% in their thirties, 27.6% in their forties, and 15.3% aged fifty or older.

The figure of 0.3% Apple users reflects about 300,000 people given the estimate of about 100 million contracts, but given that on one hand there is a lot of multiple phone ownership and on the other iPhone users may be more likely than average to be the sort of people to participate in online surveys, it’s difficult to extrapolate from the three iPhone owners in this survey.

Note that it’s not clearly stated in the survey, but looking at the wording of the questions in Japanese, there is a possibility that the survey was conducted via mobile phone internet, so the questions may actually apply to the phone currently being used to answer the questions.

Research results

Q1: Who is your main mobile phone service provider? (Sample size=1,000)

NTT docomo	49.2%
au by KDDI	27.8%
SoftBank	18.2%
Willcom	4.2%
E-Mobile	0.6%

Q2: Who is the manufacturer of your main mobile phone? (Sample size=1,000)

Sharp	25.5%
Panasonic	16.0%
NEC	11.3%
Toshiba	9.9%
Sony Ericsson	8.7%
Fujitsu	6.3%
Kyocera	5.4%
Casio	5.3%
Sanyo	5.2%
Mitsubishi	2.7%
Hitachi	2.0%
Samsung	0.9%
Motorola	0.6%
HTC	0.5%
Nokia	0.3%
Apple	0.3%
Pantech	0.2%
HUAWEI	0.1%
Japan Wireless	0.0%
Other	1.2%
Don’t know	1.9%

Q3: How long have you used your main mobile phone? (Sample size=1,000)

Less than a month	2.4%
Between one and three months	3.8%
Between three and six months	10.4%
Between six months and a year	21.7%
Over a year	61.0%
Don’t remember	0.7%

Q4: Would you want to use a mobile phone with a touch panel? (Sample size=1,000)

Already using one	2.2%
Really want to use	7.5%
Want to use	35.6%
Don’t particularly want to use	48.0%
Definitely don’t want to use	1.9%
Don’t know what a touch panel is	4.8%